Large Imagery on Small Screens

Abstract

With the focus being on digital imagery, this chapter proposes novel technology that is able to cope with the heterogeneous viewing hardware and user requirements in mobile services. With the aim to present an image at a detail level that is most appropriate for a given device and user, the main approach takes advantage of scalable image compression, transmission, and display. A scalable image is created once and multiply used for different kinds of devices and user requirements. By progressive refinement, the image is successively enhanced in detail until the device capabilities are used up to capacity. A framework that considers the most important resource types in mobile computing: computing power, bandwidth, and screen space, are introduced. Two different applications - on-the-fly adaptation at client side and profile-based adaptation at server side - are proposed leading to solutions for different application environments. Due to its flexibility and low-complexity, the proposed framework is a much more general solution compared to related approaches. This is underpinned by empirical results obtained from experiments and a discussion of the properties of the framework and its applications. Due to the novelty of the approach, some of the many possibilities for future work in this area are also discussed.